You have to run an LLM of your own and link it, if you want quality even close to approaching Google, but the Home Assistant with the Nabu Casa “Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition” speakers are working well enough for me. I don’t use it for much beyond controlling my home automation components, though. But it’s still very early tech anf it doesn’t understand all that much unless you add a lot of your own configurations. I eventually plan to add an LLM, but even just running on the home assistant yellow hardware with a raspberry pi compute module 5 works ok for the basics though there is a slight delay.

I haven’t tried, but Nabu Casa also offers a subscription service for the voice processing if you want something more robust and can’t host your own LLM, but thst means sending your data out, even if they have good privacy policies, which I’m not interested in, because while I somewhat trust Nabu Casa’s current business model and policies, being hosted in the US means it’s susceptible to the current regime’s police-state policies. I’m waiting for hardware costs to recover from the AI bubble to self host an LLM, personally.

Yeah, the issue is that it drove up the price to justify price-gouging even though it’s likely these won’t actually get purchased. They shouldn’t reserve nearly all of their product for pending transactions. They should fulfill actual demand before theoretical ones. This is clearly only possible because of the industry consolidation into essentially a monopoly. If they still had real competitors, they’d have to actually sell for a fair price and they’d be concerned that they likely won’t get paid for these “reservations”.

Yep, Western Digital said they were sold out of drives for all of 2026. Since 2026 is just starting, they haven’t actually produced those drives or gotten actual money for them.

Hopefully the bubble pops soon, though I hate that Americans’ 401Ks and IRAs will take the brunt of the “losses” when it does.

Steam is almost a necessity due to it being hard to get physical copies of games these days. The others I have totally avoided, though. The one I’m having trouble getting away from is Portainer for maintaining Docker Swarms. And I really wish Acrobat was less needed. One of the few things I have to have Windows for is Acrobat Reader so I can fill out documents. Even their website chokes on a lot of forms I’ve needed to fill out lately.

The primary issue is I don’t always access devices from only those 3 systems. If I’m traveling or I wipe my device or get a new one, I would have to add the new key to many servers as authorized keys, and I’d need to have password access enabled in order to add the keys in the first place. Also, I want a key backed up in case of disaster since all of my devices are in my home most of the time. A few people use these systems, but only I maintain them.

I paid once for a full license for Windows 98, not an OEM one that comes with a computer. They then gave free upgrades indefinitely since technically it was always the same computer, so I only needed one copy. Simplified it by avoiding a lot of the pirating crack issues and risks. Every other computer than that desktop has always had Linux, and now it does too since I dont really do much gaming anymore.

Lots. My ASUS laptop from 3 or 4 years ago doesn’t have sound bu default in several distros. It came with Windows originally. Many of the drivers are proprietary, so they aren’t included by default if they exist at all.

I think that’s a high number, maybe 90% use a browser 90% of the time. But it’s pretty common to need to use a printer or scanner which many new ones aren’t easy to get Linux drivers for, watch a video that requires audio drivers for your computer, use a video camera and mic for a telehealth visit or school which requires drivers and software. Most of that doesn’t come with Debian or on the default repos. Web browsers do more than just read the web.

Only if you have an older computer and dont need any modern drivers and dont care about graphics or music creation or gaming, and dont care that you right have to put a lot of work into getting up and running like you’re used to. But new users usually care about one or more of those things. That’s why the distros that build on Debian exist.

Definitely not good for new users if were talking desktop.

But why are the patches kept separate at all. Especially if it’s a copyleft licensed code they’re patching. Many of those require release of the code. And the spirit of that was to make companies who profit off of the code release anything they add as they add it. Otherwise, they’re welcome to instead of taking open source code and patching it, creating closed source code from scratch without using any of the code from the open source version and selling that. It’s very simple. The license says, you want this code, you’re welcome to it, but release any fixes or improvements you make do we all benefit, not just developers, but users all benefit. If they keep it locked up, even if they release it as a patch that’s not accessible to the large majority of users, then it’s violating the spirit if in some cases not the letter of the license.

Exactly. But the corporations do it because it benefits them more than starting from scratch. They should release all changes to the central repository for all to consume as part of the agreement to get the benefit of the already created software. Not hold onto the patches to give them to their customers and people who pay them with their personal information.

Same they did before or red hat does or every other corporation who has benefitted from the labor of open source developers. Services built on those things or built around them. Not the things themselves. Their corporate customers benefit from the stuff they produce, but they didn’t produce most of it,so either start from scratch with, propriety software, or they need to give the content to everyone at the same time, not hold onto it for some time. That’s against the whole idea of open source and probably technically violates some copyleft licenses, but definitely violates the spirit of them. Even if they fix some bugs or add some features, they didn’t come up with the ideas, build the thing while it wasn’t producing income, or build the communities that they collaborate with. They just add what benefits them to the existing content.

Ubuntu has that dumb subscription to get security updates that pushed me away. Sure it was free for personal use, but I don’t want to have to give my personal information to get updates that are created primarily by volunteer open source developers anyway.

X11 is way, way older than that. But it also was more actively developed for most of that time.

Wayland is still too new for a lot of complex functionality. It works well enough for the vast majority of use cases, but X11 is still superior in terms of functionality. But like many systems, control means higher learning curve due to various quirks and complex configurations.

Because the random alterations create variations that allow survival of the species, not the individual, in changing conditions. For an example of what happens without that, just look at bananas. Without any evolution through DNA alteration during procreation, a single disease van wipe them out across the globe. Happened once and the current strain is being wiped out by disease, though more slowly due to human intervention, as we speak.

It’s nice to have a GUI for those things sometimes rather than a command line for everything. If you’re doing things right, your daily login shouldn’t have access to modify system settings or read sensitive logs. But troubleshooting requires that often and ls, vim, cat, tail, etc., can become cumbersome compared to a GUI file manager and proper GUI text editor like Kate or Gedit.

That future might not be far off considering what Trump did today. Balance of power is seriously about to shift.

If it’s POSIX compliant then it will work on all versions of Linux/Unix. Otherwise it depends on specific implementations that have branched for decades.